I haven’t written about health care for a while, but the Colorado shooting reminds me of one of my hobby horses: socialized medicine. Health care, here in the United States, isn’t available to many millions of people, something that Hillary Clinton, and now Barack Obama, are trying to provide solutions to.

Something that legislators and voters need to think of, when we look at these deranged killers, is that socialized medicine includes mental health care, and that generally available mental health care can prevent some of these folks running off the rails. In most Western countries, socialized health care includes ways for mentally ill or deranged folk to get some kind of care. It is one of the things that struck me as incongruous, when I came to live in the United States, moving here from England, and before that, The Netherlands – how can you label your country as “the richest country in the world” and not provide medical care to all your people, as we do in Europe?